But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest of margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right…and that’s when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. you watch the white line and try to lean with it…howling through a turn to the right, then to the left and down the long hill to Pacifica…letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge…The Edge…There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others–the living—are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later.
You take your information, your encyclopedia text, and you transpose it into numerics. You assign everything a two-digit number, periods and commas included. 00 is a blank, A is 01, B is 02, and so on. Then after you’ve lined them all up, you put a decimal point before the whole lot. So now you’ve got a very long sub-decimal fraction. 0.17300631. . . Next, you engrave a mark at exactly that point along the toothpick. If 0.5000′s your exact middle on the toothpick, then 0.3333′s got to be a third of the way from the tip.
That’s how you can fit data of any length on a toothpick. Only theoretically, of course. No existing technology can actually engrave so fine a point. But this should give you a perspective on what tautologies are like. Say time is the length of your toothpick. The amount of information you can pack into it doesn’t have anything to do with the length. Make the fraction as long as you want. It’ll be a repeating decimal, why, then it is eternal. You understand what that means? The problem’s the software, no relation to the hardware. It could be a toothpick or a two-hundred meter timber or the equator–doesn’t matter. Your body dies, your consciousness passes away, but your thought is caught in one tautological point an instant before, subdividing for an eternity. Think about the koan: An arrow is stopped in flight. Well, the death of the body is the flight of the arrow. It’s making a straight line for the brain. No dodging it, not for anyone. People have to die, the body has to fall. And yet, like I was saying, thought goes on subdividing that time for ever and ever. The paradox becomes real. The arrow never hits.
I picked up Scott McCloud’sUnderstanding Comics from Desert Island a few weeks ago on the advice of HOVA, who told me that the book is considered one of the seminal texts of game design. I was especially interested in McCloud’s deconstruction of “the gutter,” the space that exists between panels, and it’s relation to closure, the phenomenon by which people take parts of information to construct a whole. The ideas are ones that are interesting to think about in the context of film, with film cuts serving as an analogue to the gutter. But the text also reminded me of the brilliant video for the Madvillainy song “All Caps” directed by James Reitano. In the video, Reitano makes playful use of the assumed constraints of comic panels in some sequences, whilst simultaneously paying homage to the art of Jack Kirby, one of the most influential comic book artists of all time. Plus Madlib and Doom murdah dem on the track. Dig.
Barstow where we are, around the edge of the desert, began to take the medicine. Something I like, “I recall the words a little light in the head, you probably need to drive a car…” Sky bat like a sudden and terrible roar all of us, all he was much looked like a dive filled with squealing steep decline of the city is about 100 miles per car was scheduled to return to Daunrasubegasu time. His voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals you?”
Then was quiet again. Pour beer on his chest that was taking off my shirt and his attorney, to facilitate the tanning process. “What about hell.” He is shouting words Rappuaraundosupein covered with sunglasses staring at the sun and murmured, his eyes closed. “Do not worry,” I said. “It’s your turn to drive.” I have to step on the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No points are touching the bat, I thought. Will appear soon enough poor people.
My friend Jay, a game design consultant, recently wrote a fascinating piece on the nature of the spoil-sport, and the useful role that the archetype can play in challenging the accepted norms of a society or culture. My favorite anecdote from the post involves a student who “beats” a game by refusing to play it.
All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the ‘consecrated spot’ cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground. The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc, are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.
Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles has quickly displaced my other reading, which at this point consists of a smattering of academic papers on documentary games, The Philip K. Dick Reader, and Erik Barnouw’s seminal history text Documentary. I’ve fallen deep into the rabbit hole with this one, having been completely seduced by the unknowable nature of chaos magic. The idea that Morrison created The Invisibles as a “hypersigil,” an extended work of art with magical meaning and willpower, created using adapted processes of sigilization, is something that stretches my mind to its very limits. (Admittedly, that may not be that tough a thing to achieve.)
I think Morrison would make a fascinating subject for a documentary. His persona is so fucking compelling, it’s something that could easily transcend the ghetto of comic book nerds to interest a much wider group of people who are just interested in weird art/artists working and living at the margins of human comprehension. Unfortunately, someone else seems to have had the very same idea several years ago. I hate to be a judgmental dick about it, but the production values and general approach of the trailer leave me less than excited about the prospect of the film being a well-made one.
Instead of Orson Wells stating that the books will be burnt, the books will stay there. The letters have left the page.
We wrote them on the trains. Those big, gigantic rolling pages.
